Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 [NOOK Book]

Overview

This is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Italy’s most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) achieved worldwide fame with such books as Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. But he was also an influential literary critic, an important literary editor, and a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia Ginzburg, ...

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Overview

This is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Italy’s most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) achieved worldwide fame with such books as Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. But he was also an influential literary critic, an important literary editor, and a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia Ginzburg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luciano Berio. This book includes a generous selection of about 650 letters, written between World War II and the end of Calvino’s life. Selected and introduced by Michael Wood, the letters are expertly rendered into English and annotated by well-known Calvino translator Martin McLaughlin.

The letters are filled with insights about Calvino’s writing and that of others; about Italian, American, English, and French literature; about literary criticism and literature in general; and about culture and politics. The book also provides a kind of autobiography, documenting Calvino’s Communism and his resignation from the party in 1957, his eye-opening trip to the United States in 1959-60, his move to Paris (where he lived from 1967 to 1980), and his trip to his birthplace in Cuba (where he met Che Guevara). Some lengthy letters amount almost to critical essays, while one is an appropriately brief defense of brevity, and there is an even shorter, reassuring note to his parents written on a scrap of paper while he and his brother were in hiding during the antifascist Resistance.

This is a book that will fascinate and delight Calvino fans and anyone else interested in a remarkable portrait of a great writer at work.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Acclaimed Italian author Calvino (1923–1985) is best known for his fables, stories, and novels, including If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. Yet he was also a book editor, journalist, and WWII Resistance fighter. This first English translation of 650 letters spanning the period from the war years until his death include Calvino’s correspondence with writers Umberto Eco, Gore Vidal, Elsa Morante, and Primo Levi; directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini; composer Luciano Berio; as well as mentors, critics, and others. Elegant and generous, the letters reveal Calvino’s insights on authorship (“the author... exists only in his works; outside them... he is an everyday guy, who is very careful not to ‘identify’ with an ideal character”), literature (“Romanticism, that great river of paradisiacal incontinence...”); the role of the critic; the influence of Roland Barthes; and tarot cards and comic strips on his work. The son of scientists, Calvino first studied agronomy, and his letters reflect these and other biographical details—his continuing sympathy toward the Italian Communist Party despite his defection in 1957, his move to Paris in 1967, and his comments on American, French, and Italian literature and society. In a letter to a journalist friend, he says that he’d like to teach “a way of looking... a way of being in the world.” These letters show he succeeded. (Apr.)

New York Review of Books
- Jonathan Galassi

[C]onsistently absorbing and suggestive. . . . [T]he chronicle not only of Calvino's intellectual development but of postwar Italy's. . . . The letters in this book deal with great subtlety, sophistication, and wit, and occasionally even a certain cynicism, with challenges that might have overburdened a less mercurial, multifarious, essentially sane spirit.

Prospect
- Vivian Gornick

Italo Calvino's letters . . . provide . . . pleasure and surprise. . . . In them he shines as an editor of obvious brilliance and a writer of lavish gratitude towards those who appreciate his work.

Guardian
- Ian Thomson

Superbly translated by Martin McLaughlin, these letters place Calvino in the larger frame of 20th century Italy and provide a showcase for his refined and civil voice. . . . Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 is a charming addition to the Planet Calvino—a place cluttered with sphinxes, chimeras, knights, spaceships and viscounts both cloven and whole.

Literary Review
- Robert Gordon

[I]mpeccably translated and annotated.

Brain Pickings
- Maria Popova

It is impossible to overstate just how sublime and richly insightful Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 is in its entirety.

Wall Street Journal
- Lawrence Norfolk

The image of Calvino as postmodernism's light-footed prince follows easily. But, behind that image, who was Calvino? The publication of a considerable selection of Calvino's letters affords an opportunity, or many opportunities, to ask that question anew.

Barnes and Noble Review
- Adam Kirsch

The general reader will come away from the Letters admiring this skeptical, loyal, generous, industrious man, who gave the life of letters the dignity it so often seems to lack.

From the Publisher

One of The Guardian Best Books of 2013, chosen by Pankaj MishraSelected for the SFG Gift Guide 2013

"[C]onsistently absorbing and suggestive. . . . [T]he chronicle not only of Calvino's intellectual development but of postwar Italy's. . . . The letters in this book deal with great subtlety, sophistication, and wit, and occasionally even a certain cynicism, with challenges that might have overburdened a less mercurial, multifarious, essentially sane spirit."--Jonathan Galassi, New York Review of Books

"The image of Calvino as postmodernism's light-footed prince follows easily. But, behind that image, who was Calvino? The publication of a considerable selection of Calvino's letters affords an opportunity, or many opportunities, to ask that question anew."--Lawrence Norfolk, Wall Street Journal

"[T]here is no writer alive who resembles . . . Calvino. So the appearance of a selection of Calvino's letters in English is a moment of happiness. . . . [T]hese letters offer a gorgeous portrait of Calvino in the midst of his own productivity: as an editor, a reader, a critic, an inventor of new literary forms. And they allow the reader to investigate the complicated background from which those strange forms emerged."--Adam Thirlwell, New Republic

"This collection, the first in English, gives voice and witness to a vibrant mind intensely engaged in the literary and political future of postwar Italy and the history of ideas. . . . McLaughlin's translation is award-winning; the extensive notes provide a model of masterful research. Irresistible for Calvino readers."--Library Journal

"Italo Calvino's letters . . . provide . . . pleasure and surprise. . . . In them he shines as an editor of obvious brilliance and a writer of lavish gratitude towards those who appreciate his work."--Vivian Gornick, Prospect

"Superbly translated by Martin McLaughlin, these letters place Calvino in the larger frame of 20th century Italy and provide a showcase for his refined and civil voice. . . . Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 is a charming addition to the Planet Calvino--a place cluttered with sphinxes, chimeras, knights, spaceships and viscounts both cloven and whole."--Ian Thomson, Guardian

"The general reader will come away from the Letters admiring this skeptical, loyal, generous, industrious man, who gave the life of letters the dignity it so often seems to lack."--Adam Kirsch, Barnes and Noble Review

"It is impossible to overstate just how sublime and richly insightful Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 is in its entirety."--Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

"This selection of letter offers intellectual riches and access to the workings of a wholly original mind. The presentation of the book is exemplary, with copious, precise notes by Martin McLaughlin identifying not only the recipients of the letters but also the background to the topics under discussion. McLaughlin's translation is fluent and elegant throughout."--Joseph Farrell, The (Scotland) Herald

"As the letters chart Calvino's journey from postwar communist concerns with faithfulness to history to his destiny as an imaginative maestro more concerned with being faithful to the universe, the text both instructs and entertains."--Gregory Day, WA Today

"[C]ompelling."--Tiffany Nichols, City Book Review

"[D]eeply rewarding."--Lisa Hilton, Standpoint

"[I]t is provides a far greater insight into the life of Italo Calvino than an ordinary biography would have done."--Artswrap

"Michael Wood has made a studious selection of Calvino's letters and a provides an insightful introduction that frames his selection in the larger tableau of Calvino's life and work. Ample notes further clarify many of the personal and historical details as well as the Italian idioms that appear throughout these letters. It is a book worthy of both study and appreciation."--Stephan Delbos, BODY

"Selected and introduced by Michael Wood, translated by Martin McLaughlin, the collection is a mesmerizing peek inside the thinking of the great modern fabulist. . . . Much of [Calvino's] letter writing seems to be an exercise in clear expression. . . . He is a writer as scrupulous and demanding on himself as he is on the world around him. Calvino took the role of public intellectual very seriously, convinced in his job to explore the fringes of thought. . . . A writer of such great control and refreshing playfulness, Calvino reveals how serious and unsure his journey was in this collection of candid letters."--Seth Satterlee, PWxyz (Publishers Weekly blog)

"There is much to admire in McLaughlin's translation of the letters, not least his sensitivity to Calvino's variations of style and tone, from the ironic to the pedantic. The collection also provides new texts in English that provide valuable insights into the germination of Calvino's best-known works. It captures the writer's generosity and integrity and, above all, his deep and abiding passion for literary culture."--Rita Wilson, Sydney Review of Books

Library Journal

Calvino (1923–1985) is recognized as one of the most inventive storytellers of the 20th century. His celebrated fiction includes Invisible Cities; If On a Winter's Night a Traveler; Marcovaldo; and Mr. Palomar. This collection, the first in English, gives voice and witness to a vibrant mind intensely engaged in the literary and political future of postwar Italy and the history of ideas. Selected and translated from the Italian edition, the letters date from Calvino's late adolescence to months before his death. His prodigious reading and intellectual vigilance is evident in his correspondence with fellow writers, e.g., Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, Primo Levi, Leonardo Sciascia, Umberto Eco, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and a host of Italian and foreign commentators. Highlights include Calvino's lengthy meditations on the role of the author in Italy's political and cultural sphere, which were often published in newspapers and magazines; his letter relinquishing membership in the Italian Communist Party is compelling. McLaughlin's (Italian studies, Univ. of Oxford) translation is award-winning; the extensive notes provide a model of masterful research. VERDICT Irresistible for Calvino readers.—Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal

The Barnes & Noble Review

On any list of writers who should have won the Nobel Prize but didn't, Italo Calvino would have to figure near the top, along with Nabokov and Borges. Calvino, who was born in 1923 and died in 1985, became famous in America mainly as the author of ludic, postmodernist works like Invisible Cities — a reworking of Marco Polo's travels, with a buried mathematical structure — and If on a winter's night a traveler, a classic work of metafiction that continually stops and restarts itself while addressing the reader.

But in his comparatively short life, Calvino played many roles in the literature of Italy and the world. Before he was a postmodernist, associated with the experiments of the Oulipo in Paris, he was a realist whose first successes were Hemingwayesque tales drawn from his own experience as a partisan fighter in Italy during World War II. He was also, starting with his partisan period, a Communist, striving to reconcile his intensely individual genius with the imperatives of the class struggle. When that proved impossible, after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Calvino resigned from the Party, but he always considered himself a man of the Left.

And from the very beginning of his career to the very end, he was also a publisher, associated with the leading Italian house of Einaudi. His work brought him into contact with just about every major Italian writer and cultural figure of the postwar period; many of them were his friends and collaborators, from Cesare Pavese and Carlo Levi to Michelangelo Antonioni and Pierpaolo Pasolini.

This intense activity, this committed and versatile service to letters, is the main impression that the reader takes away from Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941–1985. A big book at nearly 600 pages, it still represents just a fraction of the correspondence published in Italian, and there are large areas of Calvino's life that go uncovered — this is not one of those books of letters that can double as a biography. There are no love letters included, for instance, nor anything to his parents or relatives; indeed, just about anything "personal" is left out. At the same time, Calvino writes in such granular detail about postwar Italian literature, with references to the titles, authors, characters, and plots of hundreds of works, that anyone who is not a specialist in that literature will probably feel a little adrift. (The notes, while numerous, are not nearly full enough for the general reader's purposes — an adequately annotated edition would probably be twice as long.)

Yet this austerity feels only appropriate for a man whose ideal way of life, he confides in one letter, would be to spend twelve hours a day reading. Several times in the Letters, we hear Calvino dissuading people from trying to interview him or write his biography, on the grounds that — as Barthes was saying around the same time — the very idea of an "author" was dead, or should be: "To be able to study a writer, he must be dead, that is — if he is alive — he must be killed? Furthermore, already the existence of the work is a sign that the author is dead, happily dead if the work is worthwhile; the work is the negation of the writer as empirical living being."

Rather than an individual genius, Calvino wanted to be thought of as a member of a culture and a collective. "Life and works?" he writes to an Englishman proposing to devote a study to him. "I'm afraid I don't think I really have a life on which something can be written. All I have is a series of works that form part of the general context of literary works in our time. I am more and more convinced that literature is made up of works, genres, schools, discussions, problems, collective work in order to solve certain problems? If a critic writes about a problem and makes reference to one (or more) of my works in relation to that problem, this gives me the sense that my work is not pointless. Whereas the prospect of my bust crowned with laurel appearing along with the other busts in the hall of famous writers gives me no joy at all."

This emphasis on the collective was more than a conceit; as the Letters show, it describes how Calvino really led his life. This becomes clear from the very beginning, when we hear Calvino as a high-spirited teenage student, dreaming of a literary career with his friend Eugenio Scalfari (who would go on to become one of Italy's leading journalists). Even at eighteen, he was convinced that "italocalvino will die and won't serve any purpose any more," but the works he managed to leave behind "will remain and will provide good seed."

And he is already deeply interested in plans for journals, conferences, and literary collaborations. The careful criticisms he offers of Scalfari's poems are the first in what will become a running dialogue with virtually all the great writers of postwar Italy, in which he gives (and, more remarkably, accepts) criticism in a generous and humble spirit. " 'Among Women Only' is a novel that I immediately decided I would not like," he writes candidly to Pavese in 1949. "I'm still of that opinion even though I read it with great interest and enjoyment."

Rare, it seems, was the critic writing about Calvino who did not get a letter of thanks from the man himself, explaining where he agreed and disagreed with the critic's points: "I can't tell you how much pleasure your article gave me," he writes to one friend in 1963. "Not only for the things you say about my story?but because it marks a point of contact between your work and mine, between our trajectories."

Ideologically, Calvino's insistence on collaboration and literary community owed a great deal to his experience as a Communist. No letters survive from Calvino's months as a partisan in the last phase of World War II, but in the immediate aftermath we hear him explaining that the experience of fighting fascism is what made him as a man and a writer. "My life in this last year has been a whirlwind of adventures," he tells Scalfari in June 1945. "I've been a partisan all this time, I've been through an unspeakable series of dangers and discomforts; I've experienced prison and escape, been several times on the point of dying?. I'm a Communist, fully convinced and dedicated to my cause."

Calvino always enjoyed polemics and debates in his correspondence, and in an essay-letter of 1950 he makes clear that his Communism was no simple-minded belief that the revolution would bring paradise on earth. On the contrary, he wrote to Mario Motta, "The 'paradise' to be reached (with its little angels, or its sausage-tree: it's all the same) is the wrong way of posing the problem of man." The way Calvino defined Communism was, simply, the application of intelligence to human problems: "moments when interests in all aspects of life, communication with others, and ability and intelligence all increase in each of us-the satisfaction of seeing things gradually starting to go the right way, feeling in a better position for solving problems as they emerge."

Calvino, in other words, comes across less as an ideological thinker than a man of the Enlightenment — a disciplined, disillusioned rationalist. Inevitably, this meant he would have to break with the Communist Party, which he did in 1957, more in sorrow than in anger. But even in his later years, when he grows more interested in the abstractions of structuralism than the immediacy of politics, Calvino retains a curious, pragmatic approach to literature and society. That is why he is both fascinated and repelled by the rise of the New Left, which he witnessed firsthand living in Paris in May 1968. In a fascinating letter to Gianni Celati, he compares the New Left to Bakhtin's notion of the "carnivalesque," a sort of licensed overturning of conventional society: "periods of subversion, waste, cultural revolution, and comic-expressionist- demystifying literature."

The best way to read Calvino's Letters would be in tandem with a close study of his works, and they will be invaluable to specialists. He offers close analyses of many of his books, especially the earlier ones that are less well known in America. But even the general reader will come away from the Letters admiring this skeptical, loyal, generous, industrious man, who gave the life of letters the dignity it so often seems to lack.

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and a columnist for Nextbook.org. He is the author of Why Trilling Matters, Benjamin Disraeli, and The Modern Element: Essays on Contemporary Poetry.

Related Subjects

Meet the Author

Michael Wood is professor of English and comparative literature at Princeton University. His most recent books are Yeats and Violence and A Very Short Introduction to Film. Martin McLaughlin is the Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Oxford. He is the translator of Calvino’s Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings, Into the War, and Why Read the Classics?, which won the John Florio Prize for translation. He is also cotranslator of Calvino’s The Complete Cosmicomics.

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